I stalk toward Zoey, hands curled into fists. “Zoey, I trusted you. How could you betray me like this?” My voice cracks on the last word.
She squints at me, dark eyeliner creasing. “Betray you? I’m helping you! You were devastated that Bash died. I got your boyfriend back for you.” She beams at the way Sebastian and I are clutching each other’s hands. “I did this all for you!” She turns to Teddy, her eyes glowing. “And you! Your best friend is back!”
Teddy holds up his hands and rolls his eyes as if to say sure, whatever.
My ears perk up at her words. She’s telling me everything I want to hear, and for a moment, I lap it all up. I think of the way she’s been pushing us toward each other and her confession just now fits like two puzzle pieces connecting. But my mind lingers on the last part of her words. I did this all for you. “No.” I lift my chin. “You did this because Sebastian’s your only shot at getting credit for a project.” Plus she told me herself she was trying to impress Teddy.
“Well, yeah.” She shrugs. “That too. But that’s just an added bonus.”
I back away from her, shaking my head. “You’ve been monitoring us the entire time. Watching everything we do. Archiving our memories as we discovered new things.” It’s so obvious now; I don’t know why I couldn’t see it before. She had access to my locker to destroy the eye and rip pages out of my notebook.
She saw everything. My feelings for Sebastian. The intimacy of us writing on each other’s bodies. When I went to the bathroom. I feel violated. Splayed open on the operating table, my guts exposed.
“Not the entire time. Only the last few hours. Before that I was just going by the information you were giving me, new memories as they popped up, and the automatic HiveMind tags as memories became available to figure out what to archive via Theseus. But it wasn’t enough. I kept missing things. And I couldn’t always get access to Theseus when I needed to remove something.”
Her words tangle in my chest. That’s why she didn’t get rid of every piece of our investigation except for that one night when she gutted it all: She didn’t know everything to remove and had limited access to Theseus to do it. It also explains why she removed some memories immediately after they happened, like the ones where it seemed Kimmel forgot what he was saying: She probably archived those the instant they hit the HiveMind queue. It also explains why she didn’t get rid of my version of that same event until later: She lost her access to Theseus and had to wait until she got it back. Until a few hours ago … when she stole the admin console. Now, she has full control over everything.
“But wait,” I say. “I checked your mind. You didn’t have any memories of Bash. Plus I found evidence that you had memories archived.”
“Yeah, only because I knew you were going to check. You literally asked my permission to do so. I transferred most of them back after you did, but left a few archived just in case you checked again.”
I squeeze my eyes shut. She was always one step ahead of me, even when I thought I was one step ahead of her. My body winds tight. Holy isotopes. I even taught her the basics of hacking. I gave her every piece of ammo she needed to use against me. I wish I could reverse time, take back all the things I taught her. Take back our entire friendship.
Sebastian clears his throat. “I don’t get it though. If all you wanted was credit for the idea of creating me and for Arden to get her, um, boyfriend back, then why go through all this trouble? Why not tell her everything from the start? After all, she was confiding in you.”
My chin quivers. I need this answer to make sense. I need her to say something that won’t make me hate her.
“I didn’t have a choice. We couldn’t risk you discovering Theseus and then shutting off access again, just as we’ve started figuring out how to make it work.” She wrinkles her nose. “Though we’re not entirely there yet. Personally, I’m cool with Sebastian as he is now, but he’s not exactly marketable like this.”
Sebastian scoffs. “What does that mean? According to Leo, I’m a newer, improved version of my old self!”
“But you’re missing the main selling appeal: immortality. Without the personality transfer, a clone becomes worthless when the original dies.”
A chill runs through me. I can hear the marketing pitch in my head. You can never die as long as you can transfer yourself into an empty shell. You can be young again with a simple data upload. With a few “upgrades,” you can become taller, smarter, or any other combination with just a simple flip of the switch.
“Wait. Wait. Back up a second. Who is we?” There’s a hard set to Teddy’s chin. “Because it’s certainly not me.”
Zoey doesn’t say anything more and I suspect she’s not going to. She’s working with someone. Someone who isn’t Teddy or Leo. Someone she refuses to name.
“Why come here, then? Why not just delete the memory of this moment as we live it? You’ve done it before.”
“Yes, but your stupid backups keep getting in the way. Besides, I need Sebastian to come with me. Just until the press conference tomorrow. You can have him back after and kiss him all you want. Promise.”
I scoff. “No way in hell. He stays with me.”
“I agree with Arden.” Sebastian steps beside me, shoulder to shoulder. He laces his fingers with mine in a show of solidarity.
“Actually, I do too.” Teddy crosses his arms. “My board review presentation’s at 9:05 a.m. tomorrow. I need Sebastian there.”
Zoey lets out a heavy sigh. “I didn’t want to have to do this.” She sets her messenger bag on the table and fumbles through it. I catch a glimpse of the admin console laptop hastily thrown into her messy bag, and my entire body straightens.
I nudge Sebastian and he follows my line of vision, his jaw clenching.
She unearths a spray bottle and points it toward us. A fabric face mask dangles in her free hand. “You guys are so good at mixing chemicals, why don’t you tell me what this does? It’s sevoflurane.”
Sebastian’s face pales. “Same stuff used in anesthesia. Essentially a sleeping gas. It’ll wear off in about an hour.”
Zoey marches toward us, aiming the spray bottle at Sebastian and me. “I don’t want to use this. I really don’t. But Arden, I have no choice. This is my only chance.”
After all, if Sebastian misses Teddy’s review, he can’t get credit either. But she can. My pulse slams in my neck as I frantically assess the situation, all escape routes. But I won’t be able to escape at all if I become incapacitated while she performs mental surgery on me.
“Just don’t hurt him. Please.” Teddy’s face falls and he stands guard at Bash’s tomb. It’s obvious the him he means is Bash, not the guy Zoey’s aiming the canister at.
Sebastian squeezes my hand. At first, I think he’s telling me that we’re in this together. That we’ll stay strong, no matter how many memories she deletes, no matter what kind of chemicals she attacks us with. But then he breaks free of me and lunges toward her.
He slams into her so hard they both stumble backward and crash into a wall of cold chambers, rattling them.
Her messenger bag lies on the metal table, open and exposed, the admin console peeking out. I don’t think. I just run for it, lifting the entire bag from the table and cradling it in my arms.
Zoey screams, but Sebastian pins her down. She struggles to get out of his embrace, kicking him in the shin in the process. He flicks his eyes to me, then toward the door, the universal signal for run.
I can’t leave him, but if I stay here, neither of us will get away. Running is the only chance to save us both. I race out of the room, the backpack squeezed in my arms. I hear the telltale sound of an aerosol can spraying just before the door slams shut. I bite back the sob that catches in my throat. My lungs pump painfully as I charge up the stairs faster.
I kick open the side entrance and zoom into the cool night air. At my car, my sweaty palms catch on the steering wheel. I shift my car into reverse and back up at an angle, swinging the wheel like a stunt driver. I lurch the car backward toward the street behind me, the lack of streetlights robbing me of proper vision.
My back tire crunches over a curb and lands on the street with a thud that makes my head hit the ceiling. The car bounces for a moment, wheels spinning in the air. My teeth clench. I rev the gas and take the street at eighty miles per hour. Trees whip by on either side of me, blending into the dark night sky.
I’ve driven three towns away before I feel safe enough to park in an empty shopping center and catch my breath. The weight of what just happened descends on me.
Sebastian sacrificed himself for me. I’m on my own now, the only one who can stop Zoey.
Something she said earlier swims back to the forefront of my mind: The reason she stole the admin console was in part because she couldn’t get access to Theseus when she needed it. From what she told me, it’s clear that Theseus is only installed on those two admin computers, and I know all too well how difficult it was to gain access to the admin console stored in the IT room with all the new security protocols. If Zoey had gone through the same lengths I went through to get access, I would have seen the evidence just like the sloppy trail of smoke bombs and severed eyeballs I left behind. No, someone was granting her access to the other admin console, the one my mother said was still safe. Zoey possibly even had remote access so she was able to archive memories from her phone without being physically near the console, the same way my SSD drives allowed me to connect remotely. But it still seems that someone only granted Zoey access at certain times, not all day every day like she’d get with a stolen computer.
There’s only one person who would grant her access to the other admin console. Hell, there’s only one other person in the entire company who would care if we got Theseus to work properly, if we could transfer over Bash’s entire personality instead of letting Sebastian wake up a blank slate. With only a few days before the press conference, she would need to be confident it worked as expected before she released it to the public.
Mom.
“Oh my God.” My words give way to silence and the heavy rasp of my own heaving breath.
Everything she said to me—the software glitch, the Ethics Committee reports, that she thought I was the one behind it all—it was all a misdirection to throw me off her scent and get me out of the way while she and Zoey tried to get my project working. With a gasp, I think back to all the times she seemed to have a memory removed as we were talking, but it was either all an act or she was removing them and replacing them again right after. If I thought her memories were being tampered with, I’d never suspect her.
But she didn’t have time to monitor me or continually archive my memories, so she recruited the one person who was desperate enough to do anything she said in the hopes that my mother would change her mind and grant Zoey co-credit. My mother knew how to tamper with memories, and she probably instructed Zoey to carve out all evidence of my relationship with Bash from my mind and everyone else’s to keep me strong, to keep me from falling to pieces from grief, to give me a reason to figure out what my project is and execute it in a way I refused to previously.
Zoey isn’t the mastermind behind this whole thing.
My mother is.